ABSTRACT
Scholars have traditionally emphasised the extent to which the Seven Years’ war contributed to colonial discontent with British rule. That there was a causal connection between the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution has been so widely assumed as to become a scholarly orthodoxy. If the Seven Years’ War intensified metropolitan appreciation of both the value of the colonies and the weakness of metropolitan authority over them, it also contributed to three structural changes that would have an important bearing upon metropolitan calculations concerning the colonies after the war. The experience of the Seven Years’ War thus sent the postwar expectations of men on opposite sides of the Atlantic veering off in opposite directions. In combination, the psychological consequences and structural changes produced by the war made the relationship between Britain and the colonies far more volatile than it had ever been before.
